Starting a Trucking Company
Going from driving for someone else to running your own authority changes what you do all day. You are no longer only a driver; you are a compliance department, a credit manager and a salesperson. This section covers what that actually involves.
The four decisions that come before everything else
1. Do you need operating authority at all?
Leasing on to an established carrier means running under their authority, their insurance and their compliance department. You keep less of the linehaul, and you avoid nearly everything described in this section. Running your own authority means keeping more of the revenue and owning all of the overhead and all of the risk. Neither answer is automatically right, and the industry's marketing pushes hard in one direction.
2. Can you fund the gap between working and being paid?
You will pay for fuel, tolls and repairs weeks before a broker pays you. New carriers rarely fail because they could not find freight; they fail because they ran out of cash while waiting to be paid for freight they had already hauled.
3. Do the rates in your lanes clear your costs?
This is arithmetic, not optimism. Work out your cost per paid mile and compare it against what is actually on offer in the lanes you intend to run. Our cost per mile calculator does the maths and benchmarks it against ATRI's published industry average.
4. Are you prepared to run the paperwork from day one?
New carriers are audited. Driver qualification files, drug and alcohol testing enrolment, hours-of-service records and maintenance records are examined in the new entrant safety audit, and none of them can be created retroactively.
Guides in this section
- How to get your trucking authority in 2026 (the new Motus process) FMCSA is retiring the Unified Registration System. The current step-by-step process, including identity verification, the $300 fee, insurance filings and the new entrant audit.
- What it actually costs to start a trucking company The fixed federal costs to the dollar, the variable costs nobody can quote you in advance, and what ATRI's 2026 data says about the margins you are walking into.
What is coming
This section is being built out. Planned next: choosing between an LLC and a sole proprietorship, the new entrant safety audit in detail, and how freight factoring actually works when it is explained by someone who does not sell it.
Related
- Compliance — what you owe, and when, once you are running.
- Federal fee reference — every recurring federal fee in one table.